Thousands of people gathered on Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona expecting the results of the referendum on independence.

The violent response of the Spanish government to Sunday’s independence referendum in Catalonia came as perhaps more of a surprise than it should have. While it’s always shocking to see an ostensibly democratic government behave so aggressively toward its own citizens, the circumstances in which Spain finds itself today make it ripe for the deterioration of democratic norms.

To begin with, Spain has not enjoyed democratic government for very long; in fact, it’s one of the youngest democracies in western Europe. Spain began its transition to democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, and did not complete that process until the early ’80s, so it has only been a fully functioning democracy for about as long as the 36 years Franco reigned. Many Spaniards alive today, including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, grew up under fascism, and the country has precious little experience navigating constitutional crises in a democratic context.

A country cobbled together from several medieval kingdoms with their own languages and cultures, Spain has always had a particularly fictive national identity, which Franco’s authoritarian nationalist regime took pains to enforce. Franco canceled the autonomy that had been previously granted to Catalonia and other regions and violently suppressed Spain’s cultural and linguistic diversity, revoking the national status of the Catalan, Galician, and Basque languages and barring them from being used in schools, churches, road signs, or advertising.

After Franco, Catalonia was granted a measure of autonomy under a statute passed in 1979 and updated in 2006, but in 2010, Spain’s constitutional court infuriated Catalans by abolishing 14 articles of the statute and ordering another 27 of them reinterpreted. That decision helped ignite the latest iteration of the separatist movement, leading to waves of mass demonstrations and a referendum on independence in 2014, for which then-leader of the Catalan government Artur Mas was prosecuted. Earlier this year, Mas was sentenced to a fine of 36,500 euros and a two-year ban on participating in politics.

Since Rajoy took office in 2011, his government’s rejection of Catalan independence has done little to stifle the movement; if anything, the more stridently Madrid resists, the more determined the separatist camp seems to become. Mas’s successor Carles Puigdemont is already making hay from the bad optics of Sunday’s police response. The odds that Catalan separatists will give up and go home now on account of a bloody nose are precisely zero, and Rajoy’s strategy of coercion makes outright civil conflict more likely the longer he pursues it.

Knowing that, it may be hard to fathom why Rajoy felt the need to send a militarized police force into polling stations to confiscate ballot boxes and rough up demonstrators when those acts were guaranteed to be recorded and published online immediately. Research on Catalan attitudes toward independence by Artis International suggests that acts of suppression from Madrid only heighten pro-independence sentiment, while on the other hand, the 2014 referendum actually had a cathartic effect and ended up softening those attitudes.

Had Rajoy allowed this year’s referendum to proceed in peace, but negotiated to give voters the option of expanded autonomy within Spain as well as outright independence, he might have defused the situation and created an opportunity for compromise. So why didn’t he?

The likely answer begins with another finding from Artis: that only 23 percent of Spaniards regarded democracy as a sacred value, and that this declining faith in the system stems largely from perceptions of the national government as power hungry and unresponsive. When Rajoy was unable to form a government after a general election in 2015, necessitating another election the following year, many Spaniards simply didn’t care; they no longer saw the central government as a meaningful, much less positive, presence in their lives.

With the Spanish public’s faith in their government declining (sound familiar?), Rajoy and his center-right People’s Party now find themselves with a minority government, a tenuous grip on power, and no real mandate to lead. Rajoy has managed to remain in power thanks largely to a leadership crisis in the Socialist party, but he also faces a new challenger in Podemos, a populist left-wing party founded in 2014 as an alternative to the corrupt and ineffectual Establishment, but that has so far served only as a spoiler for both leading parties in national elections.

What Spanish voters do care about is the economy, which has been depressed since 2008, leading to frighteningly high unemployment rates and the accrual of massive public debt. Indeed, the economy is a major reason why many residents of Catalonia want out of Spain and why Madrid is desperate not to let it go: Catalonia has the highest GDP of any of Spain’s regions, accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s economic output. It also pays about 20 percent of the country’s taxes, while receiving only 14 percent of national government expenditures. If Spain is struggling now, it will struggle much harder without Catalonia, whereas pro-independence Catalans believe they would be much better off if they didn’t have to send so much of their money to Madrid.

Taken together, these conditions of political and economic stagnation put Spain in an especially fragile state. When the stakes are so high, it’s easy to see how a cornered head of government might resort to authoritarian tactics to prevent his country from fracturing even further. However, Rajoy needs to wrap his head around the fact that Catalonian independence or autonomy is a question of when and how, not if. His choice in the matter is whether to pursue a negotiated compromise while it’s still on the table, or to dig in his heels and send Spain further down the road to partition, or worse, civil war.

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THE FEED

1:53 a.m.

Might not be the right guys to achieve that goal

One was ousted from NPR amid allegations of sexual harassment. The other left Fox News shortly after writing a column widely panned as racist and anti-gay. Now they’ve been recruited to help launch a digital news startup with the stated goal of restoring faith in media.

The Trump administration is changing the way it reviews sponsors who want to care for migrant children in government custody — backing off a requirement that all people in the house are fingerprinted.

The fingerprint requirement began in June amid the zero-tolerance policy at the border that led to the separation of some 2,400 children from their parents. The children taken from parents were placed in shelters until a sponsor, often a parent or other family member, could be found and evaluated before releasing the children to that sponsor.

But the addition of fingerprinting has slowed the process and clogged the shelters. Some potential sponsors have said they couldn’t get people in their homes to be fingerprinted because they were afraid. The information is shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and officers have arrested some 170 sponsors and others on immigration violations using the fingerprint data.

I am officially declaring e-cigarette use among youth an epidemic in the United States. Now is the time to take action. We need to protect our young people from all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews. …

The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

Facebook permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier. …

Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread — privileges that appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show

Judges dismiss 83 ethics complaints against Kavanaugh because they don’t have the authority to discipline a Supreme Court justice

A panel of federal judges announced Tuesday that it is dismissing all of the 83 ethics complaints brought against Justice Brett Kavanaugh regarding his behavior during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Their dismissal did not question the validity of the complaints but concluded that lower-court judges do not have the authority to investigate or punish Supreme Court justices.

The complaints about Kavanaugh generally alleged that he lied during his nomination proceedings, made “inappropriate partisan statements that demonstrate bias and a lack of judicial temperament” and was disrespectful to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September hearing, the panel’s decision noted.

For 2020, the RNC and Trump’s re-election campaign are merging into one organization called Trump Victory

It’s a stark expression of Trump’s stranglehold over the Republican Party: Traditionally, a presidential reelection committee has worked in tandem with the national party committee, not subsumed it.

Under the plan, which has been in the works for several weeks, the Trump reelection campaign and the RNC will merge their field and fundraising programs into a joint outfit dubbed Trump Victory. The two teams will also share office space rather than operate out of separate buildings, as has been custom.

The goal is to create a single, seamless organization that moves quickly, saves resources, and — perhaps most crucially — minimizes staff overlap and the kind of infighting that marked the 2016 relationship between the Trump campaign and the party. While a splintered field of Democrats fight for the nomination, Republicans expect to gain an organizational advantage.

China is running factories in its internment camps. Some of their products end up in America.

This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released.

The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. Badger CEO John Anton said Sunday that the company would source sportswear elsewhere while it investigates.

President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to create a unified combatant command for space operations, Vice President Mike Pence announced on Tuesday.

“The U.S. Space Command will integrate space capabilities across all branches of the military, it will develop the space doctrine, tactic, techniques and procedures that will enable our war fighters to defend our nation in this new era,” Pence said during a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Jon, this week you published a piece about the Niskanen Center, a rational, culture-war eschewing, libertarian-leaning think tank that you posit could be the future of the GOP once the party evolves out of its current, absurd form. (This will clearly take a while.)

The piece inspired a Twitter commentator to point out that a lot of the center’s platforms actually sounded like President Obama’s more than anything else — a point with which you agreed. Was the 44th president really a liberal Republican all along?

anyway, Obama took elements of the old liberal Republican agenda that had been banished from the GOP: climate change, health care (where he hired the administrator Mitt Romney had hired in Massachusetts)

Ed Kilgore3:37 PM

I’d say Obama represented a convergence of two developments: Democrats warming to market-based mechanisms for achieving progressive goals, while Republicans abandoned progressive goals they used to share. Both developments were occurring under Clinton, of course.What makes the characterization of Obama as anything other than a standard liberal Democrat a bit questionable, though, is the context: six years of dealing with a Republican-controlled House (later joined by the Senate) dominated by intransigent conservatives.

But Jon’s right: Obama’s own agenda could have been supported cheerfully by those lost GOP liberal/moderates.

Benjamin Hart3:41 PM

yeah. and while jon’s original argument highlights what outliers conservatives in america are compared to other places, it’s tough to imagine obama fitting in as, say, a tory in england

Jonathan Chait3:42 PM

in some ways, tho – the tory stance on health care is to defend a state-run system!

hard to disentangle this from the existing status quo of course

Benjamin Hart3:43 PM

the overarching point is how far republicans have strayed from this flavor of at least semi-rational conservatism. are we decades away from it making a comeback in america, or, like, hundreds of years? does the party have to be electorally wiped out first?

Jonathan Chait3:44 PM

hard to project past “decades”

Benjamin Hart3:44 PM

well, you have to for this chat. I want an exact congressional map of 2142

Jonathan Chait3:45 PM

the conservative movement went from a minority faction in the GOP to the biggest faction by the late 70s/early 80s to the entire party by the 90s

Ed Kilgore3:45 PM

Like all ideologues, conservatives will have to choose between being regularly competitive or occasionally winning big and then wreaking havoc until they are expelled from office.

Jonathan Chait3:45 PM

it depends in part on what happens to democrats. If Democrats move sharply left, it opens more space for Republicans to court moderates Right now, the response to Niskanen’s ideas is ‘Democrats already do that stuff.” but if they didn’t, it would be easier for the GOP to co-opt that space.

I dunno. Conservatives soured on one-time heroes Reagan (before he became a saint again) and George W. Bush when they tried to do things to make conservatism more durable. As I think Jon has said on many occasions, conservatism can never be wrong to these people, so they have a tendency to eat their own as an alternative to ideological adaptation.

Benjamin Hart3:50 PM

it’s a nice little loophole

Ed Kilgore3:51 PM

All these characterization depend, of course, on how you think about Trump’s relationship to conservatism and to the GOP.

Benjamin Hart3:52 PM

indeed, which brings me to my last q: let’s say trump loses big in 2020. what effect do you see that having on the current conservative movement? would they just write him out as an apostate immediately?

Jonathan Chait3:52 PM

yep

it will take more than one loss to dislodge them

Ed Kilgore3:54 PM

Hard to say. I guess Trump may have permanently loosened some of the conservative movement’s once-rigid verities, like free trade. But if he’s trounced in 2020, yeah, I could see a standard conservative with some populist touches succeeding him. And Jon’s right: so long as they can find a scapegoat, conservative Republicans will look everywhere other than the mirror for the problem.

Black people are being left out of America’s opioid epidemic narrative

In the halls of Congress, a short bus ride away, medical professionals and bereaved families have warned for years of the damage caused by opioids to America’s predominantly white small towns and suburbs.

Almost entirely omitted from their message has been one of the drug epidemic’s deadliest subplots: The experience of older African Americans like Rogers, for whom habits honed over decades of addiction are no longer safe.

A 1974 New York state ban on nunchucks that was put into place over fears that youth inspired by martial arts movies would create widespread mayhem is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, a federal court has ruled.

Judge Pamela Chen issued her ruling Friday in a Brooklyn federal court on the martial arts weapon made famous by Bruce Lee.

The appointment of GOP Rep. Martha McSally to the late Sen. John McCain’s Arizona Senate seat for the new year will push the chamber to a new milestone: The Senate in the 116th Congress will have the highest number of all-women delegations in history.

Six states will be represented by two women in the Senate in the new congress, surpassing the previous record of four states, which was the case in 2011 and again in 2012, 2013 and 2018.

Kristin Gillibrand is still facing blowback from donors from her strong, early stance against Franken

“For every one person who shares a concern with me, I have at least one person thanking me, and it tends to be young women who come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to me that you stood up and did the right thing,’” Gillibrand said. She added that around the time of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, there were “a hundred” who came up to her to thank her at protest rallies.

Twitter is making it easier to see your timeline in reverse-chronological order again

The latest incarnation of the original Twitter feed can be accessed by tapping the cluster of small stars — the company calls it the “sparkle” and now so shall we all, forever — and switching to see the latest tweets.